There are many articles on applying concepts from theatre to the design of products. There are several approaches. The Brenda Laurel approach was to consider the metaphor of "theater" as a guiding metaphor for the design of software products. That is quite a good metaphor (stage, backstage, audience, supporting cast, cue cards, narrative....)
The other approach is to integrate aspects of theater into the our methods and design process. There are many articles in the ACM Digital Library, example, on methods that are based in acting, role-playing, and other theater techniques. Some of the terms used in the literature include: role-playing, informance, interface theater, bodystorming, dramaturgy, A lot of the early work on participatory design involved role playing to understand task flows and the needs of users and also to envision how a future design might affect the overall work practices. I think that training in improv is quite useful since in our work we often have to think quickly on our feet, ask good question, and show concern and interest while not biasing the person. I've never quite gotten to an improv course, but have read on the topic and think that some practice would be good for interaction designers and usability practitioners (and all the other related job titles that we argue about a lot). Here are some references related to "theater methods and approaches". Boess, S., Saakes, D., and Hummels, C. 2007. When is role playing really experiential?: case studies. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 - 17, 2007). TEI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 279-282. Buchenau, M. and Suri, J. F. 2000. Experience prototyping. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (New York City, New York, United States, August 17 - 19, 2000). D. Boyarski and W. A. Kellogg, Eds. DIS '00. ACM Press, New York, NY, 424-433. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/347642.347802 Eden, H., Scharff, E., and Hornecker, E. 2002. Multilevel design and role play: experiences in assessing support for neighborhood participation in design. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (London, England, June 25 - 28, 2002). DIS '02. ACM Press, New York, NY, 387-392. Kankainen, T., Kantola, V., Mehto, K., and Tiitta, S. 2005. Interactive drama and user centered product concept design. In Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Designing For User Experience (San Francisco, California, November 03 - 05, 2005). ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, vol. 135. AIGA: American Institute of Graphic Arts, New York, NY, 48. Kantola, V., Tiitta, S., Mehto, K., and Kankainen, T. 2007. Using dramaturgical methods to gain more dynamic user understanding in user-centered design. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity &Amp; Cognition (Washington, DC, USA, June 13 - 15, 2007). C&C '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 173-182. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1254960.1254985 Seland, G. 2006. System designer assessments of role play as a design method: a qualitative study. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Changing Roles (Oslo, Norway, October 14 - 18, 2006). A. Mørch, K. Morgan, T. Bratteteig, G. Ghosh, and D. Svanaes, Eds. NordiCHI '06, vol. 189. ACM Press, New York, NY, 222-231. Simsarian, K. T. 2003. Take it to the next stage: the roles of role playing in the design process. In CHI '03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 05 - 10, 2003). CHI '03. ACM Press, New York, NY, 1012-1013. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/765891.766123 Svanaes, D. and Seland, G. 2004. Putting the users center stage: role playing and low-fi prototyping enable end users to design mobile systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24 - 29, 2004). CHI '04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 479-486. Wakkary, R., Poon, M., Maestri, L., Kirton, T., Julihn, C., and Betts, R. 2007. How informances can be used in design ethnography. In CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 1875-1880. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240866.1240914 Woltjer, R., Trnka, J., Lundberg, J., and Johansson, B. 2006. Role-playing exercises to strengthen the resilience of command and control systems. In Proceedings of the 13th Eurpoean Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics: Trust and Control in Complex Socio-Technical Systems (Zurich, Switzerland, September 20 - 22, 2006). ECCE '06, vol. 250. ACM Press, New York, NY, 71-78. Chauncey On Feb 19, 2008 11:24 AM, Maria De Monte <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > just wondering... does anyone of you has information about interaction design > studies applied to theatre? > I've tried to put up a show using human-machine interaction principles a > couple years ago, and the results were astonishing. > I'd like to keep on working in this sense of direction. Anything in Dublin, > Ireland? > > Thanks, > > Maria :-) > > > > > ___________________________________ > L'email della prossima generazione? Puoi averla con la nuova Yahoo! Mail: > http://it.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... 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